


Morning 113 on the Go-Sci Ring

by on_the_moon_at_last



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Gen, Suicide Attempt, The 100 (TV) Season 4, The 100 (TV) Season 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-09 15:27:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19890091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/on_the_moon_at_last/pseuds/on_the_moon_at_last
Summary: Echo has felt useless. She does not live in space, she lives on the ground. Or at least, she did, and she does not know yet how to adapt to a metal tube above the clouds and enshrouded in blackness. Nia always told her useless things such as her are not fit to exist.





	Morning 113 on the Go-Sci Ring

**Author's Note:**

> Triggers for attempted suicide and mentions of past emotional and physical abuse.

She doesn’t know if she can cut it up here. For starters, she doesn’t understand all the tech words Raven spouts out as though their the simplest thing in the world to grasp. She can eventually figure some things out by context clues, it’s not like she’s an idiot, but… how useful _can_ she be if she’s a child in comparison, having to learn and relearn things over and over through seemingly endless trial and error?

She’s already been up here for one-hundred-and-thirteen days, and many of those nights were spent restless at best and wholly sleepless at worst. The Sky People adjusted readily, this was their home for their whole lives excepting the ten months or so on the ground. Her? Not so much. She only stopped climbing the walls and generally freaking out just the other day.

Her faith has no concept of hell, yet she knows she is in it. The Ring is her hell, her prison. She cannot run free and breathe in the fresh air or hunt in her favorite patch of the woods that surely no longer exist. The others, especially Murphy, can barely look at her save for the briefest of instances and only when it is during an attempt at making conversation. She is not well-versed in making a truly casual and personal conversation. Their efforts are minimal, even Harper’s. Sweet Harper, who has probably never met someone she didn’t care for at first. At first. If they learn everything she has done they would shun her forever. Blowing up Mount Weather was the icing on the cake, to use one of their phrases. She still does not know what cake is.

By her estimation, it is morning now. Or whatever passes for morning in a place where the sun is just outside and never sets or rises. No one else is awake. Good, she can’t afford to cause a scene. She tried to make herself useful, to make Bellamy think he wasn’t wasting his breath when he stopped her from- well. None of that matters now, does it? She’s tried for almost four months.

Echo doesn’t remember opening the airlock and stepping inside. Funny, because it’s the sole thing to occupy her thoughts for the last twelve hours.

The Ring has turned away from the Earth now. Her home is once again out of her sight. This massive metal tube is not her home. It is a shelter from the end. A new beginning, they say. And to the other six, perhaps it is. Not for her. Not for Echo kom Azg- no. She cannot even claim that anymore. Now she is only Echo.

She told Bellamy that she belonged nowhere. In the moment, she felt it truthful. She still feels it truthful, if she was being wholly honest with herself. Echo tried so hard to be useful and she felt none of her efforts were appreciated enough to warrant the extra oxygen. Her contributions often hindered in the early days, and Ice Nation taught her if she could not get something completed in a satisfactory manner within a reasonably small time-frame that she may as well have not done it at all. What was the point in being faulty? In making mistakes? Nia drilled that into her head enough times for it to stick. Not stick, not really.

More like seared permanently within her mind and nothing anyone said or did could help her to unlearn that lesson. The proof of Nia’s many such lessons lined her body, that they might never be forgotten. Nia. One person she is on some level glad to be rid of. But didn’t Nia love her? Echo has never known love save from her parents and she was orphaned at too young an age to properly recall them. Bellamy or Harper would say she could, but the memories were locked away. Maybe they are better locked away. She cannot disappoint people she cannot remember.

_“This is useless and unfit, Echo,”_ she remembers Nia telling her. _“Just like you. Useless things are unfit to exist.”_

Words are spoken aloud, but no one is about to make the sounds except for her. She is silent as a mouse. The ship’s demon- _no, Echo, it’s computer interface_. That is what it is called. A- what did they call it? Oh. An ‘artificial intelligence’. _Like ALIE?_ Emori made fun of her, those first few weeks, for chanting Azgeda prayers in her room to ward off whatever demons created zero gravity and talking machines. Only a moment later does she realize the words are numbers.

A countdown.

She closes her eyes and inhales deeply.

She will be free of this hell in less than thirty seconds.

“Twenty-nine.”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Twenty-six.”

“Twenty-five.”

“Twenty-“

Four?

No. Nothing.

The demon is silent. No more numbers.

“Ejection sequence aborted.”

Her eyes snap open, anger mixed with confusion contained within. A low growl rumbles from the back of her throat.

“Hey,” is the single word that permeates the silence that follows.

Bellamy.

What could he want to do with her? He has made it painfully obvious that he has no intention of forgiving her sins. Why would he stop the countdown? What had she done to deserve such a thing as this? Why was he, again, trying to save her? She saved his life and he has saved hers. They are even as far as she is concerned. She could try all her life and she doesn’t think she could understand.

Except with his next words, she does.

“We’re a family up here, Echo. A family doesn’t give up on each other.”

Family.

A second figure has joined him, pressing her hand against the glass. Harper.

“Not ever.”

She should’ve known that Harper would be here. She was probably the first one awake, seeing as she sleeps as heavily as a leaf falls onto the ground. She places her hand harder against the glass and something twinges inside the spy. She only felt this once before, a faint glimmer: with her friend in the early days of training. Echo loved that friend and that friend loved Echo. Does Harper love Echo? It would appear so. Soon the duo outside the airlock are joined in rapid succession by a blasé Murphy, a furrow-browed Emori, a concerned Raven, and an exasperated Monty. They don’t say anything more. They don’t have to.

“Family doesn’t give up on each other,” Echo repeats. The words are empty, hollow, forming on her tongue like drops of dissolving sugar. Sweet but ultimately temporary. Nevertheless, she raises her hand to the glass and presses it to Harper’s.

She steps back as Bellamy opens the airlock and collapses into the young blonde’s arms. There is a home here, in the arms of someone who cares for you. That is what her mother used to say, or so people told her back on the ground when there was still a ground on which to tread. Then the tears come. First in little rivulets, then torrents. She is openly sobbing into Harper’s right forearm before she realizes what is happening, but she doesn’t stop once she does. No, she lets the tears come. The trepidation, the anxiety. Better to get it all out now. Echo kom Azgeda is no longer of the Ice Nation. She is of this family on the ring.

Spacekru.

Yes, she likes that. Echo kom Spacekru.

Echo kom Spacekru had a home, a new family. And she could be useful after all.


End file.
